by Judy Juanita
“When is it going to feel good?”
“Give it a few minutes.”
I felt stupid with my legs up in the air. Suddenly and partly to keep my mind off the hurt, the painful feeling, I started thinking about the window and if anyone with binoculars had caught sight of two brown legs with feet on the end sticking straight up.
“My legs are tired, Allwood.”
“All right, baby.”
Then it was like buckshot exploding inside me. Unbelievable. I felt this person exploding inside me. Allwood started moving faster. What was I supposed to do with my legs? I put them alongside his back. That was more comfortable for me, but I didn’t think it was for him.
“Wrap your legs around me.”
“Like this?”
“Yeah.” His face looked like nothing I’d seen before, like he lost control of the muscles around his mouth.
It still hurt, but I was thinking, It’s over, the pain is over, finally I’m not a virgin anymore, I’m a full-fledged member of the society of people who do it. I was doing it. No. I had done it. Entry is act.
“I’m gonna come.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means it feels real good, babe.”
“Oh, Allwood, does it? What’s gonna happen?”
“Watch.” Famous last word.
Allwood’s body tightened. He got real rigid. Oh my goodness, his balls flapped against my behind. Allwood moved fast and I grinded. It still hurt, but I was so curious to see what would happen. He started shuddering. I couldn’t recall seeing anyone not in a horror movie shudder before, especially on top of me. Oh my goodness, was Allwood in pain too? Everything felt so tight, like we’d locked into each other. Of all things to remember, I saw Pit and the Pendulum, the last scene where the cage closes on the lady who did Vincent Price wrong. I bit his neck.
“Geniece Geniece,” Allwood shouted. The next thing I knew his tongue went all the way down my throat. For about thirty seconds, I thought I was going to die of suffocation.
“Did you come?”
“Did I!”
“Was it the way it’s supposed to be?” My legs were wrapped around his back.
“Yeah exactly.”
“Did you like it?” Everything felt gooey.
“Be quiet for a minute. Stop fucking with me.”
I count to sixty.
“Why is it still hard, Allwood?”
“Because I’m ready to go again.”
“What does that mean?”
“This is just a rest period.”
“You’re kidding.” All of a sudden I feel sore.
“No, I’m not.”
“You’re going to repeat the whole thing?” I wanted to get up and see how much blood I lost. I shifted around.
“Don’t do that.”
“I have to go to the bathroom, Allwood.”
“Okay, okay, get up.” It came right out like a greased pole. Allwood yawned and stretched. My legs felt like they’d been stretched apart for hours.
“How long did it take, Allwood?”
“I thought you had to use the bathroom.” Allwood looked at his watch. “About half an hour.”
“That’s all? I feel like a jockey.” I was afraid to look, so I didn’t even lift up.
“You can close your legs.”
“Okay, don’t rush me.”
I rolled over. It felt sticky. The sheet had a spot not bigger than a fifty-cent piece. Oh crap.
“Is that it, Allwood?” I was disappointed.
“Is that what?” he laughed.
“My cherry.”
“Yeah, you want to take it home for a souvenir.”
This was a big letdown, a really big letdown.
“I’m glad this is not my wedding night. I would want a divorce, or at the very least a good explanation.”
“Next time,” he said, slapping my fanny, “it’ll be better. For you.”
“Allwood,” I said on my way to the bathroom, “was I good?”
“Fair. C+.” I didn’t know if he was kidding. What was I supposed to do? Stand on my head?
Allwood walked into the shower. For the first time since we stepped into the motel room I remembered that everything had been very mellow and that we’d been relating like ordinary people the entire night. No politics, no heavy rap.
“You get an A. No kidding. You handled yourself like a pro.” Allwood laughed, but it made me feel funny. Now that I wasn’t a virgin, that could be insulting.
I wondered what Allwood would think if he could have seen inside my mind. He probably wouldn’t have cared. Maybe he would. Then again he couldn’t see inside mine and I couldn’t see in his, other than all the bookshelves. Maybe ignorance is bliss, maybe it’s plain ignorant.
“Allwood, I don’t think I want to do it again,” I told him after we cleaned up.
“I know,” he said. “You got up.”
“You mean ordinarily you start right back up and don’t clean it up or anything?”
“It depends.” Allwood started putting his clothes on. I knew he was getting lonesome for his car coat.
“Do you get any of the six dollars back, since you only stayed an hour?”
“No. Let’s hurry up. I’m hungry.”
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
Amid this frenzy, I got my semester grades:
Poli Sci, [A];
French 3, [A];
Journalism, [A], of course;
Physiology 1-1 Lab, [D]. This really hurt my GPA, because it was a five-unit course.
I couldn’t figure out if this being almost in love was hurting or helping my GPA.
11
I was almost in love. It would be interesting to find out what it takes to be in love. That little word—in—is so stupidly crucial. Does it mean you have to be inside the love or into this love or inserted or in between it? I worked myself into a frenzy over this two-letter word.
It felt like a little room was inside my body, and I had the key and I gave it to Allwood, who fumbled and got the key in the lock and pushed the door open, and the hinges kind of squeaked and Allwood went in and made himself at home. In my room. Inside my life in a room that’s a part of my body, a room I never see, a room that was so inviting to him and so mysterious to me. Where in the confines of that room was the in in in love? What was the connection between that room and my feeling for Allwood? I think when I finally made that connection something not clear became all too clear.
Inside my room, while I was outside, he walked around in it, opening and closing the windows. In my little godforsaken, me-forsaken room. Once he was comfortable, Allwood talked a lot. He did this all the time. It threw me off at first. I never seemed to recall hearing or reading about men talking a lot when they’re in the throes of passion. The image I had was they talked you into bed, and after that was accomplished, it was all grunt and groan.
What a shock to find out that Allwood, the real Allwood, the questioning Allwood instead of the statemental Allwood, came alive as he began to come.
“Do you like me because I’m light?” This was a shocker when he came up with it. He was only the most black-identified guy I’d ever known. But I was learning to let Allwood talk when he was inside the room. By not answering out loud, we got to a different kind of conversation, one we never had if I had to use my voice.
What do you mean, because you’re light-skinned? I answered him in my mind. And, as if he’d heard me, Allwood said, “Or do you like me because I’m lighter than you?” What difference does it make at this point?, one part of me wanted to say, the part that the talking Geniece would have said. But the other part, the part of me that liked that bodily way of exchanging information, did things I would never have said.
Out loud, I said, “Allwood,
I like you because you’re so smart.” That’s what I thought. I never told Allwood I liked him initially because of his meanness, which I found dangerously exciting. After I got to know him, I realized he wasn’t mean at all. So then, I had to think of what I thought he was to reproduce the dangerous feeling, which was how I got into my feeling for Allwood and my feeling, limited, incomplete, or not in love, such as it was for him in the first place.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
I found out Allwood was not mean in between our first and second time. We were sitting on the bench outside on Grove Street. The Fair Play for Cuba guys had stopped stopping traffic; I guess they met their quota of cars coming from Berkeley into Oakland. Or maybe they had to go to class. Allwood told me some of them did matriculate to Berkeley and some just stayed at City, where they could be radical for years on end.
Abner, who was neither radical nor bourgeois, mostly a species of generalized irritant, stopped to talk to us. They greeted each other like long-losts, hugging even. Allwood never hugged the Fair Play guys. They usually nodded and grunted, no hugging.
“Man, tell your ole lady why we hang so tight. Man, tell her we ain’t no fags,” Abner said. Why he would think that was beyond me, but I was curious by then.
“Aw, man, I’ll get around to it,” Allwood said, and then the two of them went into a powwow right there in front of me. They started talking as if in a foreign language—one with a lot of laughing and hand slapping. When they were through, Abner went on into the building. Allwood sat there, chuckling to himself. I shook his shoulder.
“Don’t just sit there. Tell me why.” He began to tell me about their church’s senior class outing, when he and Abner and the other kids, most of whom attended Oakland’s only all-black high school, McClymonds, had gone up to the snow near Lake Tahoe for a two-day trip. I had read about it in the Oakland Tribune. And even better, my best friend’s friend from the same church had been there too, so I knew details: the pond that wasn’t frozen solid; the sign that they ignored; the break in the ice; the kids who had fallen through; the three who drowned; the teary funerals; the sadness when the ones who didn’t die graduated. I had heard those details.
“I’ll never forget. I thought I was going to die. . . . There were feet kicking me in the head and it was cold, Geniece. That water was so cold. But it was a strange thing. It was very clear down there. I didn’t open my eyes for the first few seconds after I fell. But when I opened them, I could see my friends, my classmates. It was so clear. But it was too cold to think. All I could do was kick and be kicked. Then I saw a girl jerk her head back and her body went limp and then horizontal.”
Allwood stood up in the broad North Oakland daylight and I believed him, because he went into position, turning, jerking, kicking, and paddling.
“I grabbed her.”
“Why did you grab her?” I asked. “She was a goner.”
“Instinct, I guess,” Allwood replied. “And I went up with her. Her body, which should have been a deadweight, carried me up to the surface.”
“I don’t believe it,” I told him, even though I believed every word of it.
“She actually wasn’t dead. She hadn’t drowned. I never figured out if she saved me or I saved her. But we both got out alive.” Allwood sat, his face even lighter with this energy of nearly dying. I sat closer to him, as close as I could, in the middle of the day. The cold of the pond went through me.
“Abner knew, because he was the one kicking his way up, he knew. But the church gave me a special award for bravery.” Allwood buried his face in my neck.
“Like a plaque.” I couldn’t understand Allwood’s face in my neck at all. This was so uncharacteristic. He didn’t even hug until after we had gone to bed.
I heard him say one hundred dollars. “They gave you, you got one hundred dollars for it?” He shook his head against my shoulder.
“But what did Abner know?”
“He knew that I didn’t do shit. At least, if I did, it was by mistake.” Allwood straightened up. “Do you think they gave her one hundred dollars?”
“She’s alive. Maybe that was her reward,” I said.
“I gave her half the money, but her mother made her give it back. Her mother said I saved her daughter’s life. That’s what everyone thinks. Except for Abner.” He went on, in his way, repeating, formulating this question-and-answer hypothesis over and over. Who saved whom? How did he save her? Abner knows.
He never talked about it after that time. It was like a birthmark that he had shown me and never needed to explain again. I thought about it every time he kissed my neck, which was how he began to come. Allwood, my talky, dense Allwood, so hot and sweated up, yet so cold and confused underneath the surface of that pond. I followed him as he fell through the ice, his eyes shut against the cold, the boots of his classmates and Abner kicking his eyes open. The colder the pond, the hotter my body temperature. As he paddled and pushed to the surface, dragging her limp, inert body to the surface, Allwood pulled me sweating and shivering into the room. I could not seem to enter any other way. When he broke through and gasped the air for the first time, I gasped too, coming as hard as I could. When he and the girl, now breathing and gasping too, were rescued, I could rest and open my eyes. Then Allwood came. And we could surround each other like lovers. Before we got up, sometimes I’d think, If only I knew what it takes to be in love.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
One night, when he insisted we make love first to Cecil Taylor, then Coltrane, I told Allwood, “Don’t make me paint myself black.”
We had worked out a trade-off. Since I had gone to the Black House, he’d come to my family get-together. Neither of us wanted to go at first. We had that in common. It had taken time, but we were pulling together.
“The Black House. Why is there so much fuss over black? Black this, black that. Five years ago, you couldn’t pay people to say the word. Now they want to lie down and die in it.”
He sighed, and from the shelf in his head picked up a book—yet another bible full of new commandments. (1. Think Black. 2. Feel Black. 3. Look Black. 4. Buy Black. 5. Learn Black. 6. Love Black. 7. Talk Black. 8. Fuck Black. 9. Act Black. 10. Be Black.) As Allwood hunted down his citation, I listened to myself. To my dismay, I sounded like my family. If I were arguing the same point with my family, I’d be Allwood and they’d be Geniece. I’d be schooling them and telling them to be black. It happened every time I visited home. My cousin called me a Stokely Carmichael windup doll. Yet here, with Allwood, I acted in direct opposition to that. I wanted the music off.
“I only want to hear us. The music will drive me crazy.”
“That,” Allwood said with the authority of a kindergarten teacher, “is just what you need.”
“No,” I said. We stopped midfuck, and I got up and lifted the needle. “I don’t want craziness. I want my nice orgasm the way I’m used to it. I want my own explosion. I want your hip bone rubbing against mine, that’s all that it takes.”
I had been coming on my own since I was five, when I picked up the idea that I was a mermaid. In my sleep I became one every night, a blond one with nippleless titties. Coming was nothing unusual for me. Maybe finding out right before my period started that what I did to myself after the rest of the world quieted was called sex, maybe that was unusual. It held the same amount of pleasure for me as sneezing, which I did a lot because I was allergic to pollen. Coming itself was no big deal. Why did I have to do this the black way?
I picked up the album covers. “I don’t want Trane going up my vagina. It’s so simple. Let’s fuck, let’s roll, let’s come.”
“You’re too practical, even about sex,” Allwood said. “You’re like a man.” We argued this in the middle of sex, started it up, got it going, and, Boom! our own version of coitus interruptus. It made for a bigger climax.
“
I’m not greedy, I don’t want more. I want the same.”
“It’s never the same, even if you think it is.”
He stood up naked, his skin the color of a Lorna Doone shortbread cookie, his penis very hard and insistent, almost an exclamation point. Allwood was the exclamatory voice; I meant to put an end to things with my once-and-for-all declarative. The music went on. I got back in bed but needed a little more arguing down to heat back up.
“I think sometimes,” he said, following McCoy Tyner’s bang-a-bang-banging up and down my spine, “you would have been better off if you had never learned how to masturbate.”
Now how was he going to work in burning in hell, pimples, and the Black Thang? The music went on, Cecil Taylor thwacking his ivories right into my eardrums and Allwood following close behind with his tongue. He came out for breath but Cecil held his ground.
“Don’t look so defiant, Geniece. It just would have been nice,” his voice had begun to slur and soften, “if your first orgasm had been with me.”
“But, Allwood,” I said, now on top of him, “I come with you because I came with me over and over first.”
“This is different. You’ll never forget this,” he said. Famous last words, I thought.
He came. I came. And, glory be, as the old folks say, you learn something new every day. It was better with the music. Bigger. Creamier. Harder. Softer. Faster. Slower. So black was beautiful, and I was a believer in—if nothing else—the eighth commandment.
12
Having roaches in my place was embarrassing when we first saw them; worse was becoming pals with them. Allwood sprayed my mattress for roach eggs outside next to the brick incinerator. I sprayed the whole place, and after two days Allwood carried the mattress back inside. We sat there like it was a luxurious feather bed. I wasn’t sure how he was feeling, but I was feeling sweet, sweet, sweet. I decided to thank him with my special tamale pie. After all, how many people fumigate for you?
I bought Red’s Tamales (“Tuesday is Red’s Tamales day,” their TV ad said), six to a package, two cans of Hormel chili with meat, chopped green onions, and grated a cup of cheddar. I layered the tamales and chili with the green onions, topped it off with the cheese, and popped it in the oven. I also bought a package of frozen sliced strawberries and two packs of Hostess Twinkies.